I was following one of their tutorials and it had you doing things like using rbenv and bundler, and none of that crap worked right. I don't remember the specific error messages, but it was all crap like "Can't load Gem <such and such>" or "can't load required file <blah>", etc, etc.

In that case, part of the problem was documentation (as far as I can tell in retrospect, I never really needed anything other than the Ruby 1.8.7 I already had installed), but just being exposed to rbenv and the mess of that world left a bad taste in my mouth.

Of course, it's not just Ruby. I have no use for the similar tools for any environment, that purport to let you keep multiple versions installed simultaneously. Whether it's for Python, Groovy, Ruby, whatever. I've come to the conclusion that it's just plain A Bad Idea to do that sort of thing.

Maybe that tutorial was old. Use their Debian packages. It bundles a private Ruby that is only used for running Chef. It always works and never breaks.

Interesting... I guess I didn't find any packages that bundle private Ruby, or if it does it does it behind the scenes and I just don't know it. But what I'm fighting with now, is install some Gems that one of the tutorials has you install... when I run "bundle install", one of the Gems flakes out because it requires Ruby > 1.9.1, and doing a "apt-get install rubygems" earlier apparently made Ruby 1.8.7 the default on this box again.

Ran "update-alternatives" and set Ruby back to 1.9.3 and now when I try to install the Gems, I get failures like:

"in `require': cannot load such file -- mkmf (LoadError)"

I think I'm making progress, but man, this is frustrating.

To be fair though, the basic Chef install is done and working, and I can run "knife client list" and see my clients. It's just that I'm trying to get through this EC2 tutorial and it has you installing this specific list of Gems, and that's where the problems are now. sigh

Yes I can see why installing Ruby is frustrating wit those kinds of errors. The thing is, Debian split Ruby into multiple packages, but made a lot of them not installed by default, which causes a lot of headache for users. The mkmf thing is supposed to be a standard part of Ruby, and most developers assume it is always available, but I Debian put it in `ruby-dev` I think, so you get that error if you don't `apt-get install ruby-dev`.

If you're not a Rubyist and just wants to use Chef, Chef's own Debian packages work great. You can ignore RubyGems and update-alternatives and other stuff, Chef's Debian packages provide everything you need.

I think that Chef should go through the tutorials and clean up the old things.